For the last several years, a group of friends have entered a mostly silent retreat for the several days over the new year. This year, on New Year’s Day we took a hike in the mist-jeweled hills along the Pacific coast. As we walked, we mingling silence, poems, and sohbet (Rumi’s word for soul-to-soul conversation). Before leaving the house, each of us had chosen a “poemcard” from my deck of about 100 favorite poems and poem fragments, which I have been collecting for the last 10 years.

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Our first language is poetry. Literally. All over the world, mothers croon to their babies in rhythm and rhyme. Perhaps this is because the womb itself is a poetic place. Your ear is against the iambic meter of your mother’s heartbeat. You are steeping in sounds that have been changed by their passage through the amniotic fluid into a kind of whalesong. A mother seems to know this. Even before she talks English or French or Swahili to her baby she says, “Goo goo gah gah see see mah mah!”

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You may have heard me say, quoting the actor Austin Pendleton, “There are two ways to jump off the Cliffs of Moher. You can either squinch your eyes shut and clench your fists all the way down, or you can open your eyes and look at the sights rushing by.

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Recently a friend pointed out that two of the major power spots for my work are the diametrically opposite islands of Ireland and Hawaii. I don’t know if there is deep inner meaning in this, but it does remind me that as a child, I had a passion for stories about far away islands where people were recognized for who they really are, their essential, radiant nature – no matter how obscured that might be. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Peter Pan, and The Island of Blue Dolphins, for instance. Usually there is a wise animal involved, like Aslan in the Dawn Treader or Nana in Peter Pan. Always they had to go through some kind of initiation: a fierce confrontation with their own defenses in which they were tossed and tempted by life until they came out radiant and humbled and ever more true to the visionary within. Most of these people were children, because – almost always – children are the only ones with the willingness to throw themselves unabashedly into mystery and possibility and be changed and reborn in the process.

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I write to you from a delicious and rare moment in my own home. Today California spring worked its seduction upon me, and I managed to tear myself away from this computer screen to hike up the mountain (well, hill really) across the street from my house. Though the separation from my inbox always requires an act of will, as soon as I set foot on the path I am swooning in the feast of filtered light playing over my skin, bluebelly lizards staring me down as long as they dare, Mount Tamalpais presiding over the horizon.

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“The language came from the land,” Letitia intoned in her lush Welsh accent. “Remember before Christ and before and before and before when we had 13 eyes on our body, and 13 ears? We still have them but we don’t use them. We heard sounds that we don’t hear anymore. And we began to repeat them and form them into language.”

I met Letitia at the first workshop I gave on the “far” side of the Atlantic: Wales, 2006. It was my first taste of a culture – and here I include both Welsh and Irish – where poetic language seems inscribed in the marrow, where lines of Yeats or Dylan Thomas rock babies to sleep, where poets have been seen throughout the eras as the wisdom keepers and mystics.

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Since 2006,  I’ve spent part of my summers in the Celtic realms – Ireland, Wales, Scotland and a part of England called Dartmoor,  thanks to the original invitation of Chloe Goodchild, visionary singer and founder of The Naked Voice, and her tribe of gifted facilitators. Through no conscious plan of my own, I find myself in a deep discipleship to Celtic Goddess Brigid, keeper of the triple flame of Poetry, Healing and the Fire of Transformation.

Ostensibly I go there to teach – workshops, retreats and the Poetry Depths Mystery School. Yet I am not deceived by this apparent role! There is no doubt that I am also a student here where, not so long ago, Bards were the wisdom-keepers of the tribe, and, in the indigenous tongue, the word for poet, fila, is also the word for mystic.

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On the very day Saved by a Poem was finally published (after five years of rewrites!) a dear friend said, "But it's got the wrong title! It's should be called SLAIN by a poem, not Saved by a Poem!" She was absolutely right. A central summons in my work is to let yourself be slain by the poem, whether you are reading it on the page, speaking it aloud, or hearing it: let those tears or that gust of laughter break open the cage of your personality, let that involuntary sob turn your quiet voice into a wail or a whimper; fall into that velvet silence between you and whoever is with you in the precious awkwardness of not knowing what to say in the wake of a poem that has hit it's mark.  

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